Dyalog APL - raison d'etre

[neeraj]

With the Covid-19 lockdown I finally have had some time to catch up on some programming knowledge. It appears that it is no longer sufficient to know Dyalog APL only to create software applications that can be used by a wide audience, for e.g., applications such as Evernote or Tableau on Desktop, or finviz.com, freshbooks.com or twitter.com on the web. On the mobile front an application such as Robinhood would be impossible. So, as far as I see, Dyalog APL remains as a very useful tool for interdepartmental work or a very specialized application on the Windows platform whether used internally or externally by a fairly small audience. MiServer could probably be used to create applications for a few users, I do not know if it is powering any commercial applications with thousands of users.

Dyalog have expressed their distaste for supporting native GUI on MAC, Windows and Linux, instead preferring to be a calculation engine instead with HTMLRenderer ( or something similar) providing the GUI but I think the GUI is still a work in progress.

I think at this time for Cross Platform Desktop Applications Java or Electron would be the obvious choice with the scale tilting in favor of Electron, and HTML/CSS/JavaScript is the Stack for the Web. Considering that Electron itself is node, JavaScript, CSS and HTML, the obvious technology stack appears to be this. In my opinion, It might make sense for Dyalog to create a package that can be easily accessed from this stack as the Array Processing Engine. Another possible place to look at would be something similar for the Python community, maybe integrating with Python and Flask.

In conclusion, at this time, in my opinion, except for a Windows Application with Classic GUI, it would be nearly impossible to rely on Dyalog APL as the main technology. So, am I missing something?